Gorbachev Begins His Purge : ‘The Hell With You!’ He Told the Plotters : Soviet Union: Leaders of the coup are dismissed. A shift in authority and power to Yeltsin seems to be emerging.

MOSCOW —  Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, back in office but perhaps no longer truly the supreme leader of his land, on Thursday fired the defense minister, KGB chief and other plotters who tried to overthrow him and signaled a wide-scale purge of other Communist reactionaries.

Throughout this jubilant city, one could see signs of the tectonic shift in Soviet politics that has occurred in only four days, the slide in authority and power from Gorbachev to the man who led the opposition to the right-wingers’ coup, Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin.

From an evening splash of fireworks to a “rally of victors” that brought Yeltsin and as many as 100,000 people to the steps of the Russian “White House” to celebrate the putsch’s collapse, the day seemed to belong not to Gorbachev, whose rule had been saved, but to Yeltsin, who had fought so stoutly to save it.

When at about 1 p.m. the red flag of Soviet Russia was struck from the roof of the White House and the pre-revolutionary tricolor hoisted in its place, to many it was a sign that one kind of regime had ended and a new one was about to begin or was already under way.

In other developments during the first 24 hours of Gorbachev’s restored rule:

- Speaking at a televised news conference, Gorbachev kept the reporters and a large part of the planet spellbound by telling how he, his wife, Raisa, and other loved ones had been held prisoner for three days in their Crimean dacha by the rightists. At one point, Gorbachev said, he thought he might be killed.

- Of the eight members of the State Emergency Committee that had tried to topple Gorbachev and seize power, six were in custody by Wednesday evening, and a seventh--Interior Minister Boris K. Pugo--shot himself to death to avoid capture. From the official Tass news agency to the Communist Party hierarchy and its flagship newspaper Pravda, institutions that abetted the putsch or did little or nothing to oppose it were scrambling to claim that they had been loyal to Gorbachev and the Soviet constitution all along.

- Crowds in Moscow late Thursday pulled down the black bronze statue of “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky, the father of the state security agency that ultimately became the KGB, which for progressives and radicals such as Yeltsin incarnates the most loathsome traits of Soviet totalitarianism.

- The Parliament in breakaway Latvia outlawed the Communist Party, and the republic’s government said it was seeking the arrest of the republic’s hard-line party leader, Alfred Rubiks, who supported the coup. In Lithuania, another Baltic republic, Soviet troops were reportedly evacuating the TV tower they seized in Vilnius in a brutal tank-led attack in January that killed 14 people.

Striking Back

After flying back to Moscow from the Crimea and sleeping for only two hours, Gorbachev moved rapidly and on numerous fronts to “eliminate all consequences of the plot and to punish the guilty” by firing the rightists and voiding their decrees.

Army Gen. Mikhail A. Moiseyev, the Soviet armed forces chief of staff, was named acting defense minister to replace Dmitri T. Yazov, a putschist. Gorbachev told reporters that Moiseyev had been on vacation at the start of the week and hence not involved.

At the KGB state security agency, located across from the now-demolished statue of Dzerzhinsky, Gorbachev fired coup member Vladimir A. Kryuchkov and appointed Lt. Gen. Leonid V. Shebarshin, previously in charge of the KGB foreign intelligence operations, to the chairman’s post.

Col. Gen. Vasily Trushin, 57, deputy interior minister, was named to replace Pugo. Russian authorities said the Russified Latvian, about to be arrested at his apartment, stuck a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Before committing suicide, Pugo may have tried to kill his wife; she was reported hospitalized with gunshot wounds.

Of the other plotters, Prime Minister Valentin S. Pavlov was under guard in his hospital room; he was confined to bed Tuesday ostensibly for high blood pressure, perhaps a pretext for bailing out of the coup.

Vice President Gennady I. Yanayev was arrested in his office, and a manhunt was being mounted outside Moscow for the only member of the State Emergency Committee still at large--peasant leader Vasily A. Starodubtsev.

Gorbachev said he has no intention of launching a “witch hunt” to root out his right-wing foes--men he called enemies of change--but added that in government, the legislature and the party, measures are under way to determine who the collaborators were.

On Thursday, the Communist Party Secretariat began a probe, with Gorbachev’s full backing, of senior party officials who had been involved.

“It’s my duty to the very end to contain reactionary forces in the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) and drive them out,” said Gorbachev, who is party general secretary as well as Soviet president. “We should do everything in order to undertake reform in the party.”

Although he spoke with visible anger of the “suicidal men” who had confined his family and tried to overthrow him, he seemed ready to forgive smaller fry who had only obeyed orders.

“I know that people who did certain things did them under duress,” he said.

At an emergency session of the Soviet legislature, to open Monday, Gorbachev’s old university chum, Speaker Anatoly Lukyanov, will also have some explaining to do, Gorbachev hinted.

Lukyanov, although not a member of the State Emergency Committee, was denounced Thursday by Yeltsin as “the chief ideologue of the putsch,” and as someone who, although a top-level official in the Soviet government, did nothing to oppose the coup.

Who Has Power

One of the crucial questions addressed by Gorbachev at his news conference was the future of power in the country, with many of the pillars of the central government--the Defense Ministry, Interior Ministry and KGB--now stained by their involvement in the putsch, which Gorbachev called the “most difficult trial” in his 6 1/2 years as leader of the Soviet Union.

During Gorbachev’s captivity, Yeltsin had moved against the plotters by putting all Red Army soldiers in the Russian Federation under his command, transferring the republic’s radio and TV facilities from central control and firing the man Gorbachev had named head of Soviet broadcasting--all steps that, under existing Soviet law, he is not entitled to do.

On Thursday, Yeltsin tried to knock out one of the pillars of the right by ordering the disbanding of Communist Party cells in Russian-based military units, which he charged “promoted the involvement of the military in the war on its own people.”

To ensure that “people power” is not the only defense that his government has, the Russian president also endorsed the formation of a Russian national guard, immediately challenging a decree from Gorbachev that makes local armed formations illegal.

Finally, although Yeltsin had previously agreed to Gorbachev’s blueprint for a new, federal-style Soviet Union--a decentralization of powers that should have been signed Tuesday--Yeltsin now claims an even greater share of decision-making for Russia.

“The Union Treaty has got to be amended,” he told the crowd.

It is on such issues that Yeltsin and Gorbachev have butted heads so often in the past, but Gorbachev, who expressed his gratitude to the Russian president for helping end the coup, seemed to acknowledge that he will now be forced to relinquish much more to the Russian Federation’s president.

“The Russians have acted based on supreme interests, and what they passed was prompted by the situation,” Gorbachev said when asked his opinion of the questionable ukases Yeltsin issued during the coup.

He was also scheduling a meeting today with Yeltsin and the leaders of the eight other republics who helped work out the Union Treaty to discuss the “severe” lessons learned in the past few days.

A further shift of powers from Moscow to the outlying republics seemed likely, as well as a wave of dismissals.

“We will be discussing personnel with the leaders of the republics,” Gorbachev said.

With both Yeltsin and Gorbachev back in Moscow, the No. 1 question of Soviet politics once again became the ability of the two to work together. Gorbachev said the coup had been the acid test that proved he and Yeltsin were on the same side of the barricades: “The coup hardened us, and we know who is who,” he said.

As of now, Gorbachev will have to listen to Yeltsin more than ever--the new reality of Soviet politics inscribed on one banner toted by Russian demonstrators who marched from the White House to Red Square: “Mikhail--Remember Under Whose Flag You Were Saved.”

Gorbachev also gave clear indication that he will be seeking a grand coalition of all forces who want to change Soviet society, including those that now say Gorbachev’s programs of perestroika and glasnost have been outpaced by the need for full-blown, Western-style capitalism and freedom of expression.

“We need to resolutely promote all reforms and to regroup forces for this purpose,” Gorbachev said. “We need to deal with this immediately. Without this, there will be no concerted action, and we will not ensure the advance of reform.”